Follow by Email

Tuesday, 7 July 2015

A quick (cinephile) visit to Milan’s Pinacotheca Brera

A quick cinephile visit to Milan’s Pinacotheca Brera
involves making some judicious links. There is first, probably the best known
painting in the collection, Mantegna’s “Body
of Christ”. Situated in a darkened area at the end of Gallery Six, the painting
is fixed to wall low down, somewhere between waist and knee level. It’s behind
glass. The effect is intended, I assume, to emphasise the foreshortening that
Mantegna has attempted to convey by his choice of angle. Whether he captures
it, masters it is problematic but the effect is still stunning and the choice
was revolutionary in its day and beyond. That beyond stretches all the way to
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone which frames the Accattone (Franco Citti) character
in ways which reference the painting. I looked all over the net for a picture
to compare but came up blank.

Mantegna's The Death of Christ

The one Caravaggio in the Brera, a masterly work, “Christ’s
Dinner at Emaus”, doesn’t link to anything more than the movies devoted to the
painter over quite some time.

La Fiumana

But then there is Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s “La Fiumana”,
the painting which sits behind, and is slowly revealed during, the credits of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento (1976). Bertolucci’s film,
deemed by some to be a grandiose potboiler whipped up to support the Italian
Communist Party in what was thought might be the Party’s forthcoming crucial
first electoral victory in Western Europe. It was not to be and the film was
sent around the world shredded, something like the CP’s hopes. Only when later
released on DVD in a version that seems to have slipped past the censors
notwithstanding some quite daring sexual elements did the full four hour show, which
many do now deem one of Bertolucci’s great works, get back before the public.

Finally a surprise. I first saw the paintings of Vittore
Carpaccio at Venice’s Accademia Gallery maybe a decade or so ago. Painting
around the beginning of the sixteenth century, he was a master in representing
the lives of his fellow Venetians. In Venice today, as well as the paintings in
the Accademia there is one building where nine of Carpaccio’s works can still
be seen. Forgive a quick dip into Wikipedia at this point: From 1502-1507 Carpaccio executed another notable series of panels for
the primarily immigrant Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, (Schiavoni
meaning "Slavs" in Venetian dialect). Unlike the slightly
old-fashioned use of a continuous narrative sequence found in the St. Ursula series, wherein the main
characters appear multiple times within each canvas, each work in the Schiavoni series concentrates on a
single episode in the lives of the Dalmatian's
three patron Saints: St. Jerome, St. George
and St. Trifon. These works are thought of as "orientalist" because
they offer evidence of a new fascination with the Levant: a
distinctly middle-eastern looking landscape takes an increasing role in the
images as the backdrop to the religious scenes. Moreover, several of the scenes
deal directly with cross-cultural issues, such as translation and conversion.

At the Brera
there are two more Carpaccios and one of them contains a surprise. The figure
of a bald white haired and bearded man on the left side of the picture is a
dead ringer for John Flaus! See for yourself insofar as a tiny reproduction
allows. Believe me, in the flesh it’s an uncanny resemblance. Flaus however is
just not that old, I think.

Vittore Carpaccio's The Presentation of the Virgin. John Flaus at left

Now, to complete
the circle. One other thing is clear, whomever did the design work on MGM’s Kiss Me Kate (George Sidney, USA, 1953)
had clearly seen and henceforth drew much inspiration from Carpaccio’s Venetian
paintings. The film has been restored and new 3-D copies are now circulating
including one that filled up the small cinemas at the Cineteca. You can get it
on DVD and Blu-ray as well to see just how good Hollywood was at borrowing from the masters.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Followers

About Me

This is a blog devoted to things of interest to cinephiles. The subjects are randomly selected in the manner of a diary and are somewhat oriented to Sydney, Australia. In the past I used to send out these entries via regular emails but this has trailed off and its best to check here for anything new.You can contact me direct via email at filmalert101@gmail.com